Basketball Rivals in a Rematch With Low Stakes

‘Magic/Bird’ at the Longacre Theater

About a third of the way through “Magic/Bird,” a new play about the basketball greats Magic Johnson and Larry Bird that opened on Broadway Wednesday night at the Longacre Theater, a moment of conflict, that crucial building block of drama, finally arrives.

Taunting insults are exchanged. Simmering hostility is heated to a boil. Words are flung like fists, and violence threatens to erupt.

Unfortunately this tense encounter does not involve either of the play’s nice-guy central characters but anonymous fans in a bar, rooting for their favorite teams and displaying the Rottweiler instincts of sports maniacs the world over. Their brief, volatile encounter turns out to be the most dramatic moment in “Magic/Bird,” an efficiently informative but uninspired trek through the lives of two towering (forgive the pun) figures in sports history.

Written by Eric Simonson and directed by Thomas Kail, the team behind the modest popular hit “Lombardi,” about the celebrated football coach Vince Lombardi, “Magic/Bird” represents another workmanlike attempt to colonize a small patch of Broadway for the underserved straight male constituency, which now has something to drag wives and girlfriends to in exchange for attendance at, say, “Wicked.”

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Magic/Bird Kevin Daniels, left, and Tug Coker at the Longacre Theater.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Before digital brickbats come flying my way, I should acknowledge that there are plenty of women and gay men with a passion for basketball too (and no doubt plenty of straight men who’ve happily made return visits to “Wicked”).

In any case, while none who followed the concurrent N.B.A. careers of Mr. Bird and Mr. Johnson are likely to learn anything revelatory in “Magic/Bird,” they may be content to relive the highlights reel presented here, which is amplified by scenes that attempt to portray the human side of the superhuman athletes.

But as depicted by Mr. Simonson, and portrayed by Kevin Daniels (Mr. Johnson) and Tug Coker (Mr. Bird), the dual heroes never emerge as nuanced or magnetic stage figures, and the celebrated rivalry between them — which revived the flagging fortunes of the N.B.A. in the 1980s — stirs little more excitement, since their relationship off the court was one of mutual respect but minimal interaction, and hardly intimate friendship. (Although hoops occasionally descend from above, and a few balls are thrown, only video clips give us a sense of the players’ particular skills.)

Admittedly Mr. Simonson faced a particular challenge in manufacturing excitement from the clipped mutterings of the ambitious but reserved Mr. Bird, the self-described “hick from French Lick,” a small town in southern Indiana, who is presented here as laconic to the point of catatonic.

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Video clips projected onstage display dramatic highlights from the careers of Larry Bird (Tug Coker, left) and Magic Johnson (Kevin Daniels), who met three times in the N.B.A. finals.Credit
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Mr. Coker’s dour expression and minimalist responses to attempts by coaches and others to draw him out are amusing at first, but men of few words are not what appealing drama is generally made of. (Mr. Coker is also saddled with a wig that makes him look like Frankenstein’s monster with a bad dye job.)

Mr. Johnson was the more outgoing figure, and his dramatic (albeit temporary) retirement from basketball in 1991, when he announced that he had contracted H.I.V., provides a dramatic frame for “Magic/Bird.” The play opens with this arresting moment in both the history of professional sports and of the AIDS epidemic, and includes video clips from the news conference during which a gallant and charming Mr. Johnson made the announcement, confirming rumors that had been whipping through the sports and media worlds.

The play then flashes back through the years of the players’ competitive careers, beginning when Mr. Johnson’s Michigan State team took the college championship over Mr. Bird’s Indiana State. Recruited by Red Auerbach (Peter Scolari), the determined general manager of the dormant Boston Celtics, Mr. Bird soon becomes a sensation, and the Celtics begin making regular appearances in the N.B.A. playoffs.

Their chief rivals are the Los Angeles Lakers, where Mr. Johnson is brought aboard to join a lineup already including Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Mr. Johnson’s flashy style and terrific skills turn him into both a star player and a media darling, and the Celtics and the Lakers meet in a series of N.B.A. championship matchups that Mr. Simonson uses to juice the drama.

Video

Excerpt: 'Magic/Bird'

A scene from Eric Simonson’s new Broadway play starring Kevin Daniels as Earvin “Magic” Johnson, Tug Coker as Larry Bird and Deirdre O’Connell as Georgia Bird.

There’s not much juice to be found off the court, it seems. Mr. Bird, a dogged competitor, keeps to himself and rebuffs Mr. Johnson’s attempts at collegial camaraderie on the few occasions they meet, at least until they are courted by Converse to shoot a sneaker commercial together. The negotiations over this commercial, and the moderate bonding over similarities in their histories that takes place during the filming, must perforce act as the emotional crux of the story.

It’s a pretty unimpressive one, despite the appealing presence of Deirdre O’Connell as Mr. Bird’s mother, hovering over them as she prepares lunch, heaping praise on Mr. Johnson as her mortified son hangs his head. Then it’s back to respectful distance, as their rivalry begins to falter when Mr. Bird begins having back problems and the specter of Mr. Johnson’s discovery of his H.I.V. status looms.

Mr. Daniels doesn’t have Mr. Johnson’s megawatt smile, but he exudes an easygoing warmth that matches up with the player we see in frequent video images projected on the back of David Korins’s court-theme set. Mr. Coker gives a dutifully tight-lipped, emotionally opaque performance as Mr. Bird. Ms. O’Donnell and Mr. Scolari are excellent playing several supporting roles. (Mr. Scolari and Francois Battiste are the combatants in that scene at the sports bar.)

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Mr. Simonson drew on interviews with both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Bird in writing the play, and it seems possible that their participation may have hampered a more probing approach to the characters. Then again, perhaps they are as likable and fundamentally colorless as they are presented here.

But the primary obstacle in writing about sports stars for the theater is that the achievements that make them inspiring figures are almost always the feats they performed on the court or the field. Those, of course, can probably never be dramatized in any truly engaging manner onstage.

A version of this review appears in print on April 12, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Basketball Rivals In a Rematch With Low Stakes. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe